Saturday, September 29, 2007

This comic book story by Lou Trakis appeared as filler pages in Katzenjammer Kids issue #20 published by Standard Comics in the Spring of 1952.

I don't know anything about the artist, but he sure knew how to draw comics with a carefree, breezy look!

Click on the pictures belowto see BIG Hi-Res scan of each comic book page

I just really enjoy the loosey-goosey, bouncy-silly look of these drawings. After scanning through hundreds of pages of old comics, these just jumped right out at me.

The artist is obviously very skilled, but he's not slick in the slightest. That's a good thing.

I love the goofy faces with the wonky expressions. The faces of all the characters looks the same, but he makes up for it by giving each one a very distinctive costume and hat. Very primitive...like a Bazooka Joe comic.

Friday, September 28, 2007

There's a lot of George Herriman's Krazy Kat being reprinted these days, but not so many people are familiar with one of his other newspaper comic strips from the 1920's, Stumble Inn.

Stumble Inn is kind of like Fawlty Towers in that it all takes place in a small hotel with a small cast of regular characters...

The Main characters are:Uriah Stumble,

-- the long-suffering proprietor of the eponymous hotel...

Mr. Owl-Eye,the "house dick"(or hotel detective, if you please...)

Mr. Weewee (oui, oui)the French chef who works in the kitchen

and Joe Beamish --

a character who does absolutely nothing but sleep in the soft chairs in the lobby. I gather from the strip that he's not a paying guest, but rather just a lazy local who takes up space. It's amazing how much mileage George Herriman can get out of a character that never so much as opens his eyes!

Oh -- and a never-ending supply of "guests"that can "stumble in" to the strip for added comedy situations.

Okay -- enough intro!__________________________________

On with today's Stumble Inn comic strip ...

Here's the whole Stumble Inn comic strip at 300dpi...

Yes, folks...this giant 6-panel strip is a DAILY comic strip! It measure about 6 inches tall by 12 inches wide. Too big to fit in my scanner. It's bigger than today's Sunday strips! I bought a small run of 26 consecutive comic strips on eBay a few years ago, and every single one of them has just as much love and detail and early 20th century urban funkiness as this one does.

His pen strokes are so assured and bouncy, filling his cartoons with vim and vigor!

According to Allan Holtz at The Stripper's Guide, George Herriman's Stumble Inn ran 10/30/1922-1/9/1926. That's right in the middle of his Krazy Kat output. George Herriman worked on at least 27 different comic strip titles in his life, and oftentimes many different strips ran at the same time. During his 1913-1944 run on Krazy Kat, he also concurrently created strips such as this one and Baron Bean ( I always liked that play on words: barren bean = empty head. I love it when people called someone's head their "bean.")

On a personal note, it is the cartooning genius of George Herriman (along with Roy Crane, and Harvey Kurtzman) that got me really excited about the boundless possibilities of cartooning. Now that there are so many reprint projects going on, I urge you to seek out the work of these "old masters" of cartoon art.

If you'd like to see more of these Stumble Inn daily strips, please leave a commentand let me know!

Well, this story was a pleasant discovery...some really top-notch freaky pre-Marvel sci-fi/horror comic book pages from the King of comics, Jack Kirby.

This is from Alarming Tales #1, September 1957

Published by Western Tales, Inc. and Harvey Features Syndicate. This comic book story is one of five tales in this all-Kirby extravaganza. If you get a chance to lay your paws on this comic book, get it! It's a winner through and through!

As usual, CLICK on any one of the pages below to see a large-size kooky Kirby comics page.

It looks like Kirby spent some time inside Steve Ditko's fevered imagination before drawing this story! Clearly, Jack Kirby knew how to draw those kind of extra-dimensional landscapes many years before Steve Ditko drew them in Marvel Comics' Strange Tales with Dr. Strange.

This 1957 comic book story was drawn just a few years after Richard Matheson wrote the short story "Little Girl Lost," but it was five more years before this imagery showed up on the Twilight Zone when "Little Girl Lost" was adapted for TV in 1962. I wonder if "doorways to another dimension" was a popular pulp-fiction theme at the time.

As usual, CLICK on any one of these pages to see a large-size comic book page.

Whew! That was a close one! Amazon.com WidgetsWould you like to see more stories from this comic? Leave a comment below and let me know what you think! Thanks...--Sherm